Integral Spirituality: A Startling New Role for Religion in the Modern and Postmodern World by Ken Wilber

Author:Ken Wilber [Wilber, Ken]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Spirituality, Philosophy, Psychology, Religion, Self-Help, Non-Fiction
ISBN: 9780834822443
Google: n-92sivPE2sC
Amazon: B005OLFMDA
Goodreads: 18869859
Publisher: Shambhala Publications
Published: 2006-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

Zone #5—Cognitive Science and Autopoietic Organisms

We’ve spent more than 50% of this book talking about interiors, including the scientific studies of the interiors, so we must have covered most of cognitive science, right? Actually, almost none of it. To understand why is to understand one of the most fascinating perspectives (and methodologies) available to human beings: the outside view of an inside view of an objective organism (3-p × 1-p × 3p)—or zone-#5 approaches to Right-Hand realities.

Let me briefly introduce this view by reminding people of what Maturana and Varela did with their rather revolutionary biological phenomenology, which they also called “the inside view of the organism.” They made it clear that they did not mean “phenomenology” in the sense of trying to understand what the organism—let’s say a frog—was experiencing subjectively. They were not trying to reconstruct the “I-space” of a frog (which would be UL phenomenology). Rather, they were simply trying to reconstruct what was available in the subjective-cognitive world of the frog, but they were still thinking about that in objective terms. It was the “inside view” of the frog approached objectively—hence, an objective account (3-p) of the inside or subjective view (1-p) of the frog, which itself is still approached in objective or scientific terms (3p). Thus, 3-p × 1-p × 3p. That “1-p” or “1st-person” term in the middle is what their biological phenomenology or “the view from within the organism” was all about.

And that was enough to revolutionize biology and biological epistemology. At first it shocked the biological world, which was used to using models such as systems theory to understand the behavior of the frog. But Maturana and Varela pointed out that, when it comes to the frog’s actual phenomenology, systems theory plays no role at all—in fact, it doesn’t even exist in the frog’s world.

Which is absolutely true. There is a role for systems theory, but that is part of the outside view of the organism, not its inside view. Rather, a biological organism is an autonomous, coherent, and self-making entity (auto-poiesis means self-making), and this self-making organic entity cognizes and actively brings forth a world, it does not merely “perceive” a world that is already given. In short, the biological organism co-creates the world it perceives. (This was, in a very positive sense, a postmodern biology.)

This approach revolutionized not only biology, but also many of the other scientific approaches to exterior holons. This is the fundamental difference between classical behaviorism and autopoietic behaviorism. The former looks at the objective organism from without (zone #6), the latter, from within (zone #5).

As for zone-#5 approaches to the individual (in the UR). Cognitive science, which is now the most widely adopted approach to the study of consciousness (and hence, indirectly, spirituality, if the topic is allowed), is the “official” view of modern science of what is real and not real when it comes to consciousness and its contents. Typical theorists in this area include Daniel Dennett, Ray Jackendoff, Patricia Churchland, Paul Churchland, Alwyn Scott (Stairway to the Mind), and so on.

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